Why require any car parks at all?

The council says it will assign a case manager to help the Cashmere business owners work through parking and liquor licence issues.

Kaizuka’s owners, Dwayne and Tiffany Vaughan, have been been locked in a battle with council over the issues for more than a year. Fed up, they considered closing. They believe the car park requirement is still unachievable, but having a case manager assigned was “positive”.

According to the City Plan, 10 car park spaces were required per 100 square metres of public floor area, but reductions could apply. The 800sqm bar had 18 car parks, so the Vaughans believed they needed 62 more car parks to meet resource consent requirements.

Whether they need 80 or 39 car parks, why is this a requirement at all?

There are dozens or bars in Wellington with no car parks. One can even argue better for a bar not to have car parks.

But why not leave it to each shop whether or not they have car parks, and how many? They have the best incentive to make it easy for customers to visit them, and work out the right number – rather than a Council blanket rule.

Paulus Gnome

jonar

@DPF
There’s a good answer to your question in the comments – other business owners are being affected.

The issue is that the premises has taken on a larger hospitality identity to what it was before when it was a garden centre/ café. Now the entire site is dedicated to a bar/ hospitality function which by default means that more patrons will be entering the property and remaining there for longer – hence the planning laws to this particular site. This has already been impacting the local Centaurus Rd businesses by their parks being taken by Kaizuka patrons – so people drive past to the next dairy or whatever if they can not park there. People who want bread or milk typically want to park, zoom in and out quickly. They are not going to park 50m down the road and walk back.

Than

The problem with not requiring car parks is that people will try and park nearby anyway. That doesn’t only affect the business in question, it can often be disruptive to other businesses and residents nearby. In this particular case Centaurus Rd is quite windy, and isn’t that wide for the amount of traffic it carries. If large numbers of cars started parking along the side of the road that could potentially be a traffic hazard.

Having a fixed rule linking required number of parks to area is stupidly inflexible. But requiring businesses to provide enough parks that they are not disrupting those around them is fair and reasonable.

Mobile Michael

I know of a convenience store in Lower Hutt that got knocked back for insufficient parking. So the plan was resubmitted with sufficient parking but no extra land assigned for the car park. Of course the parks are too narrow for people to open doors but the plan rules were met.

Exactly. The ability to dump your problem into the common is why such rules exist. My current contract is a prime example of this. We’ve been relocated to an industrial area and the company has decided that, with a few exceptions, it doesn’t have to provide parking. There are residential streets nearby, so most staff and contractors can park there. The cost is ‘socialised’ and the company doesn’t need to worry about parking arrangements. As there aren’t commercial alternatives, the sufferers are the workers and the property owners/tenants. I’ve raised this point and been told there’s nothing wrong with using free parking areas and it’s not the company’s problem.

Now, what council is trying to do is avoid this scenario (a tragedy of the commons). Free parking, even if time limited, is provided in one location for some reason (my own property has unlimited parking outside and people often use it to visit us), and suddenly someone figures out they can use this for themselves. That buggers up the whole thing for all of us, in the long-term.

So council is actually intervening to stop a tragedy and we’re complaining. It’s coercion, yes, but to avoid worse problems.

mikenmild

It all should depend on the location and nature of the business. At one extreme, a supermarket obviously needs to provide lots of parking. At the other, a small café or shop in a main business street doesn’t need to provide any parking. Whether a council writes a rule to cover this, or make case-by-case decisions, doesn’t really matter.

Pongo

Given the road and its residential spot they really do need to provide their own parks but surely not that many, having 15 minute signs is fine but its miles away from any enforcement officers area and given its hospo it will be nights and weekends so hard to enforce.
If you have a home nearby and there are 15 minute signs everywhere your visitors are to park where if they pop over.

redeye

Quote of the day for me on the Stuff site was;-

Quelch6 days ago

The Mad Hatter has taken control at the council. Monday of last week they decree that businesses in St Asaph St have to lose 100 car parks in order to make it easier for cyclists to shop there. But by Friday, a pub in St Martins has to add 62 parks in order to make it easier for motorists to imbibe there. So the council’s policy is apparently to discourage driving to buy a TV, but to encourage it for the purpose of consuming alcohol.

And as noted, you’ll limit other public users, who are happily enjoying their existing circumstances. Having 15m signs if great for a few spots, but if you’re in or near residential property, this results in people getting pissed off (and legitimately so). By simple logic, why not having all permit parking and then allocate each household a permit or two for visitors? Why not charge them for the service? Or maybe a selected rate on the local households for yet another ‘service’? There is no solution here which doesn’t add more complexity or reduce utility and destroy a perfectly good commons. Capitalism dictates that you pay for what you use and if council wants to mandate a minimum standard, with exceptions if you can prove it, it’s no less an affront than any of the other dammed silly planning rules they have, beyond it actually being based on not reducing a public good. This is no different from mandating minimum parking on residential properties, as otherwise every developer will just dump cars onto the street, and say it’s not their problem.

OTGO

Rich Prick is on to it. If the council didn’t get involved with parking rules they could’t employ a “case manager” to “work” with the business owners.
Because if you make a rule you have to employ someone to enforce it. Pool inspectors every two years. Back flow device inspectors annually to name a couple.
The prosecution rests.

jonar

@MT_Tinman

As DPF noted a simple time limit on parking outside other shops helps solve the problem.

I like the way you guys can solve the problem without even considering the actual details. There’s already 3 parks with 10m time limits but some of the other businesses require longer stays. There’s limited parking since it’s a residential area. In actual fact it’s probably the other business owners that have complained to the council about the parking.

burt

In other breaking news;

Jonar makes a case for takeaway places needing to have comfortable seats and free wifi because people wanting to buy takeaway shouldn’t need to stand and be without wifi.

Oh, and extra carparks because without them some people might go to different takeaway places and the council must protect business owners from their own stupidity of where they choose to open a business.

mikenmild

davidp
Presumably you moved to that location as it is now.
I guess it is one point of view to say there should be no restrictions. If Foodstuffs wants to buy a few residential properties and open a new supermarket with no parking, some would say they should be free to suffer the consequences of such a bad decision. In the meantime, the residential street would be stuffed with their customers’ parked cars.
In the real world, local authorities recognise that some businesses need to provide car parking. Not all businesses, and it is dependent upon location.

davidp

mikenmild>In the meantime, the residential street would be stuffed with their customers’ parked cars.

The street is a shared resource for everyone. You have no right to park outside your home. If you want parking rights, then either build a driveway on your property, or rent a carpark nearby. Don’t try and monopolise this resource for your own use by taking away the rights of others.

I think this might be a generational and lifestyle issue. I like having restaurants and supermarkets nearby. It makes for a lively neighbourhood. I got very used to this living overseas. But older New Zealanders are stuck in an era where people lived in suburbs with little going on nearby. My parents are in their 80s and they’re horrified by even tiny amounts of increased traffic, or the idea that there might be a restaurant hundreds of meters down the road.

Brian Marshall

You are completely right davidp. The road is a common and it’s every bodies right to park on it and drive on it. Even move sheep or other livestock on it.
The council imposing a blanket rule on a business is a council that is losing sight of their job.

mikenmild

davidp
I live very near a supermarket and fast food restaurants. They provide ample car parking, as they should.
Lots of neighbourhoods have residents-only parking zones. I presume these are an outrageous infringement on your liberties. After all, the residents of inner city suburbs should be responsible for altering their properties to accommodate cars, or not buy there.

greenjacket

Milkenmilk: “I live very near a supermarket and fast food restaurants. They provide ample car parking, as they should.”

Milky thinks supermarkets should provide parking because of a State fiat.

Whereas I think that supermarkets will provide car parks themselves without needing Government fiats because supermarkets want to attract customers.

Kaizuka Eatery and Garden Bar want to attract customers, so they will set out as many car parks as they feel is necessary to meet the demand to their business and attract customers. That a planning bureaucrat in the Council magically knows more about their business shows the interfering “we know best” arrogance of local government.

Fentex

DPF; Jonar: You fix that by making some parks maximum 15 minutes. Not requiring 84 new carparks!

That’s a specific solution to a specific problem, what iof the disruption isn’t to locations so easily protected?

I think this might be a generational and lifestyle issue. I like having restaurants and supermarkets nearby. It makes for a lively neighbourhood. I got very used to this living overseas. But older New Zealanders are stuck in an era where people lived in suburbs with little going on nearby.

Such conflicts are why planning rules exist – to mediate between citizens differing interests. It’s a continuing problem – how much change must people be required to accept when they’ve built the neighbourhood and paid the rates that built it’s amenities?

Our planning laws we sort of inherited, in concept, from the UK where they were created in the mid-nineteenth century to address issues the common law could not as new industry reshaped cities and factories began to demand resources (such as water and sunlight) others were using.

If laws have existed for decades with designs to protect the character of neighbourhoods and people bought and lived there expecting those plans to be honoured how much change is it reasonable to expect them to accept? Does anyone, for example, have a right to expect in their residential neighbourhood not to have a night club built next door?

We’ve all probably heard the argument against people building near airports and then demanding flight operations be restricted – that they oughtn’t build there if they didn’t like airports. Well, what makes the inverse – don’t build near residential properties if you can’t provide for your own business’ needs – different?

wreck1080

peterwn

In the 1990’s the Wellington City Council wanted to limit CBD private parking but require businesses, churches etc in suburban centres to provide umpty ump car parks. There were submissions in opposition and when decisions came out there was an appeal to Environment Court. Council ‘pulled’ the requirement to help get the plan through. Whether or not it has tried to introduce this again goodness knows. Perhaps the Regional Council should be required to provide so many off street car parks for each bus stop in the inner suburbs. Wellington inner suburb streets are getting clogged with park and ride (buses and bikes) parking, especially just beyond coupon parking zones.

simonway

Lots of neighbourhoods have residents-only parking zones.

A ridiculous government giveaway to the wealthy (i.e. people who can afford to buy and maintain cars). I’m surprised, mikenmild, that you’re defending this kind of middle-class welfare. If there’s a shortage of on-street parking, it should simply be metered (or, rather, permits should be charged at or near market rates).

If you hand out parking permits to residents for free, then the government is effectively giving them a car park. So that’s going to be factored in to the cost of the house. Which means that if there’s a renter living in the neighbourhood who can’t afford a car, and relies on public transport to get to work, the government is FORCING her to pay for a car park that she can’t even use.

So the effect of resident parking schemes is to take money away from poor people and give it to rich people.

mikenmild

jonar

@burt

In other breaking news;

Jonar makes a case for takeaway places needing to have comfortable seats and free wifi because people wanting to buy takeaway shouldn’t need to stand and be without wifi.

Oh, and extra carparks because without them some people might go to different takeaway places and the council must protect business owners from their own stupidity of where they choose to open a business.

Boris Piscina

Life will be much simpler when we can store our Skycar Hypersonic Individual Transports (S.H.I.T) in virtual form on a flash drive or similar, reconstituting them into drivable holograms as required, via the Car Reconstitution Application Protocol (C.R.A.P).

Parking will then become a thing of the past, leaving more space for small inner city housing developments such as the Accommodation Nano Urban Space (A.N.U.S).

I think that makes as much sense as a great deal of what comes out of Councils 🙂

CharlieBrown

Hmmm – national have been in power plenty long enough to curb the over-regulation implemented by local government, to curb the proliferate spending of local government, and to greatly limit the brief of local government…. but I guess they are just happy sitting on the seats of power doing jack as everything is great as labour left it according to the nats and their supporters.